1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to automated customer support and service in a distributed computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Technical support services and programs are designed to diagnose and solve hardware or software problems that users and/or customers encounter as they use computers. As businesses continue to move on-line, distributed computing environments become more complex and, thus, more difficult to troubleshoot. Indeed, entire businesses now desire to connect their critical business systems directly to employees, customers, vendors and other important constituencies. To this end, many internal or external business network applications are now being connected to the Internet's World Wide Web to make the information accessible from anywhere using conventional browser software.
Traditional technical support centers place their emphasis on internal tracking and productivity tools, such as problem tracking systems. Such "back end" systems exist internally to the support organization and are usually transparent to the customer. Although back-end systems aid internal efficiency, they do little for the actual problem resolution process itself. Problem resolution is typically left to telephony-based technologies such as agent-based automatic call distribution (ACD) support centers and intelligent voice response (IVR) devices.
Such techniques attempt to diagnose and address problems on a remote node without actually having the technician travel to that node. The most common method of technical support is still a telephone conversation with tech support personnel. Other known techniques involve a network "login" to the remote node so that the conditions may be evaluated from the technical support center's viewpoint. The network connection may be used to run a diagnostic program on the remote node, or "self-help" fix-it programs may be downloaded to the remote note and executed there.
With the explosive growth of the Internet, the latter approach has been quite popular. Several companies now provide personal computer (PC) diagnostic technology in the form of diagnostic agents that run on a client machine and that perform certain low-level diagnosis and self-help for the user. Some of these products also return status information to a server, but they are primarily "client-centric" in the sense that the programs are designed to run on a user's machine in a generally autonomous manner. They implement relatively simple functionality as compared to known server-centric diagnostic tools that are generally used by developers and technicians for application debugging and problem resolution.
Thus, while it is known in the prior art to provide separate client-centric and server-centric PC diagnostic tools, the art has yet to provide an integrated approach to technical support. This problem is solved by the present invention.